


when the lights cut out

by driedvoices



Category: Green Lantern: The Animated Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 07:08:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/671664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/driedvoices/pseuds/driedvoices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He often catches himself trying to remember the exact moment at which Aya stopped looking like Ilana.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when the lights cut out

He often catches himself trying to remember the exact moment at which Aya stopped looking like Ilana. There is an importance in the betrayal of his memory: if he can trace backwards a line of experimental touches made casual, of clumsy platitudes veiling terrifying sentiment, perhaps he can identify the second that struck a change in him, that turned him from saboteur to prisoner to crew. But no such line exists, because instead they have created a web he finds himself inextricably tangled in, one that is cool like metal and warm like fingers, one that rationalizes and rages, and no single event exists to be ascertained because Aya is not a chain of events. Aya is a machine, and Aya is a person, and Aya is wearing Ilana's face, and Razer has to remind himself that there is something unnatural about that.

He had been laboring under the impression that time hardened. His guilt wears thin and fragile, like old glass.

 

 

-

 

 

Surely, then, there must have been a change in her as well. It cannot be the obvious one, her sentience into a body, but something deeper, something intrinsic. Or could she have been always as she is now—nowhere near artificial, but instead organic, chthonic, simply waiting for a construct to give her a voice? Razer considers a girl inside a ship, and then a ship inside a girl, and closes his eyes because both are wrong, especially since he can see her plainly in front of him, a gradual etching of her form onto the insides of his eyelids.

He wonders what this would seem from her perspective. In his imagining, she is cool, detached, analytical. Ilana is dead. Razer is alive. Aya is neither. Aya does not love. Razer—

In his head, this is simpler for her. That is wrong, as well, but he could not bear the correction.

"Razer," Aya says, eyes serene and forward, staring into black, shifting space. "What are you thinking?"

"Hm?" says Razer. He blinks once, and stares at her fingers on the console. He does not like to look at her face when she is not looking back; it feels akin to voyeurism.

"You are often silent, Razer, and you often fixate on points that I have calculated to be random. In these situations, your heart rate slows almost to an extent to suggest sleep. Do you think of your love?"

"No," says Razer, straightening up in his chair. His reply had been too fast, the question a surprise. "Sometimes," he amends. He forgets, occasionally, that he is still capable of gentleness. It's a shock that his tongue does not trip around the syllables and twist them into something ugly.

"What else?" Aya asks. Razer only shakes his head.

I think of you, he does not say. That would be trite. Also true, but beside the point, and, he imagines, redundant.

 

 

-

 

 

She is not Ilana, was the mantra that he first drilled into his mind, when his frown lessened under her gaze, when he felt his heart soften in her presence. Somewhere along the line it has turned to _she does not love you_ , which was equally troubling but somehow easier to believe. She has never spoken to him in Ilana's voice, and she has never laughed Ilana's laugh, but if she loves as Ilana loved—

He takes her to his _home_ , and she knows the steps and she remembers the pain. She _felt_ the pain, and if she can feel, then love, fickle it may be, is terribly, dangerously near to him.

Simply, he thinks. Ilana loved, and Ilana died. If Aya can love, then who is to say that she can't—that she won't—

There are precious few things holding Razer to this world. To endanger one so crucial is borderline suicidal.

He pulls her to him, and she does not pull away. She tilts her head up at him inquisitively, and this close, her parted lips are a new thing, fascinating and knowable. This moment does not belong to the past. Aya does not breathe, and Razer is holding his breath, and the stillness between them almost makes up for the tremor in his hands.

Razer has never been much for self-preservation, anyway.


End file.
